KIRKUS REVIEW

Just in time for Earth
Day, yes, a hopeful book of strategies for delivering the planet from our worst
environmental depredations.

“Cities and nations
thrive when leaders anticipate the future—and dream big,” writes former New
York mayor and media magnate Bloomberg, who partners with former Sierra Club
chairman Pope in alternating chapters. In a time when national leadership seems
bent on denying the facts of climate change and failing to plan for the
likely consequences of it, the authors propose that smaller-scale efforts are
more likely to produce the desired results, efforts that “empower cities,
regions, businesses, and citizens to accelerate the progress they are already
making on their own.” For instance, Pope—who seems, on the whole, wonkier than
Bloomberg—looks at ways in which electrical utilities can lead the way in
shifting to renewable sources of power as opposed to being forced into it, one
measurable result of which has been bad blood in coal country as a result of
the Obama administration’s headlong plunge into cleaning up the coal industry
without making necessary provisions for the workers who would be left jobless.
Which isn’t to say that Bloomberg isn’t without his techno-nerdy side: he
writes assuredly of the many ways in which cities such as New York have
re-envisioned the role of the automobile, though with a political slogan or two
tucked inside his prose for good measure: “more city leaders are recognizing
that when the interests of cars and people diverge, people should come first.”
Elsewhere, Bloomberg looks into the role of buildings in climate change—they
are, as he notes, responsible for some 70 percent of greenhouse gas
emissions—while Pope notes that the future of climate change is not yet
written, though sticking to a reasonable and salutary regime of energy
consumption will “take decades to be felt.”

Whether this is an
exercise in thinking globally and acting locally or vice versa, a thoughtful,
eminently reasonable set of proposals for saving New York—and therefore the
world.

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